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Lessons in Newspeak: How to make a sociologist sound Orwellian

03 Apr 2012, 13:00

Ros Donald

"If you don't believe in climate change you must be sick':
Oregon professor likens skepticism to racism", according to an
article published on the
Daily Mail's website over the weekend. But this Orwellian news
of a villainous conspiracy to cure dissenters looks like little
more than one more example of the Mail's willingness to add skeptic
blog
The Register's, shall we say, selective reporting to its daily
churn.

Professor Kari Marie Norgaard, to whom the views are attributed,
presented a paper at the Planet Under
Pressure conference in London last week. Norgaard and her
colleagues had
conducted a study to examine "cultural inertia as a social
process" in the case of the policy measures that are needed to
tackle climate change.
She says that the climate change message damages our perception
of ourselves because it raises "fear about the future, a sense of
helplessness and guilt".

It is a little bit difficult to know where the Mail got its
claim that Norgaard "suggest[ed] that doubters need to have a
'sickness'" - but it appears to be attributing it to a
sentence in the press release:

"Resistance at individual and societal
levels must be recognized and treated before real action can be
taken to effectively address threats facing the planet from
human-caused contributions to climate change."

Treated! As in sickness - get it? We were at the
pr
ofessor's talk at the Planet Under Pressure conference last
week and heard no suggestion Norgaard considers skeptics to be
sick. It looks rather more like some bright spark at The Register
(which incidentally left out the other half of the sentence,
therefore divorcing it from the context) made that connection. The
paper itself isn't yet available but you can see some of Norgaard's
previous work along similar lines here and
here.

The University of Oregon has since removed the offending word
from the press release, along with Norgaard's email, prompting hue
and cry at the skeptic website
Watts Up With That. There, the thought is briefly entertained
that she may want to avoid receiving unpleasant emails, before
being brushed aside in favour of dark murmurings about a Communist
plot.

The second press release
quote exercising The Register and the Mail is:

"'This kind of cultural resistance to
very significant social threat is something that we would expect in
any society facing a massive threat,' she said. The discussion, she
said, is comparable to what happened with challenges to racism or
slavery in the U.S. South."

Is this the same as "comparing skepticism to racism"? In the
press release, Norgaard used the example of attitudes to race, but
taken in context it looks far more likely that she is making a
comparison to historical instances when societies resisted
fundamental changes, not the attitudes themselves . As her
abstract says:

"Using ethnographic and interview data
we describe the powerful processes that work at the psychological,
institutional, and societal levels to maintain the current
orientations and ensure social stability in spite of the evident
imperative for change."

It appears that the repackaging of Norgaard's research as a
Clockwork Orange-style call to re-educate the masses first appeared
in the information technology blog
The Register (which has a curious skeptical line) on 30th
April.

The Mail appears to have borrowed heavily from the piece,
judging by the similarity in the first paragraphs of both pieces.
James Delingpole of the Telegraph also
reproduced comments from The Register - without linking to
Norgaard's work.

How an IT blog became the Mail's source of choice when it comes
to skeptic framing of climate change issues we don't know, but the
same food chain
process was evident in last week's Mail story about the
Medieval Warm Period. Now, with a hat tip to the Mail article, US
skeptic stalwart Rush Limbaugh is also repeating The Register's
framing - with his own fruity brand of speculation about everything
from Norgaard's political leanings to her love of camping.

Skeptic blog Prison Planet - also quoted in the Delingpole piece
- encapsulates the extent to which Norgaard's words have been
exaggerated:

"The effort to re-brand legitimate
scientific dissent as a mental disorder that requires
pharmacological or psychological treatment is a frightening glimpes
[sic] into the Brave New World society climate change alarmists see
themselves as ruling over".

Quite. And lo, by the power of inference, a sociologist from
Oregon turns into Big Brother or, according to
Delingpole, controversial Soviet pseudo-scientist
Trofim Lysenko.